Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science

Before Nature explores a period before the concept of "nature" existed in human thought—when there was no word, reference, or sense for it. In ancient Assyria and Babylonia, ancestors developed systematic inquiry into the world in ways comparable to modern science, yet without the framework of physical nature that Western thought takes for granted. Francesca Rochberg examines the Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and its relationship to the broader history of science. She demonstrates how ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies, established a relationship between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to argue how cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation can be understood in relation to science without relying on later concepts of nature. Through systematic examination of Mesopotamian science using a distinctive historical and methodological approach, this work offers new perspectives for studying the history of science.